Modernism And Japanese Culture

An in-depth and comprehensive account of the complex history of Japanese modernism from the mid-19th century 'opening to the West' until the 21st century globalized world of 'postmodernism.' Its concept of modernism encompasses not just the aesthetic avant-garde but a wide spectrum of social, political and cultural phenomena.

By adopting an open, multidisciplinary, and transnational approach, this book sheds new light both on the specific achievements and on the often-unexpected interrelationships of the writers, artists and thinkers who helped to define the Japanese version of modernism and modernity.

What happens when a critique of modernity -- a "revolt against the traditions of the Western world" -- is situated within a non-European context, where the concept of the modern has been inevitably tied to the image of the West? Seiji M. Lippit offers the first comprehensive study in English of Japanese modernist fiction of the 1920s and 1930s. Through close readings of four leading figures of this movement -- Akutagawa, Yokomitsu, Kawabata, and Hayashi -- Lippit aims to establish a theoretical and historical framework for the analysis of Japanese modernism. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a general sense of crisis surrounding the institution of literature, marked by both the radical politicization of literary practice and the explosion of new forms of cultural production represented by mass culture. Against this backdrop, this study traces the heterogeneous literary topographies of modernist writings. Through an engagement with questions of representation, subjectivity, and ideology, it situates the disintegration of literary form in these texts within the writers' exploration of the fluid borderlines of Japanese modernity.

This volume is a multi-faceted study of the development of modernism in Japan, with authors from Japan, the United States, and Australia spanning the fields of art history, social history, and literature.

Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism examines the seminal role of art magazines and artistic collectives in shaping modern Japanese art and aesthetics during the early 20th century.

In the decades between the two World Wars, Japan made a dramatic entry into the modern age, expanding its capital industries and urbanizing so quickly as to rival many long-standing Western industrial societies. How the Japanese made sense of the sudden transformation and the subsequent rise of mass culture is the focus of Harry Harootunian's fascinating inquiry into the problems of modernity. Here he examines the work of a generation of Japanese intellectuals who, like their European counterparts, saw modernity as a spectacle of ceaseless change that uprooted the dominant historical culture from its fixed values and substituted a culture based on fantasy and desire. Harootunian not only explains why the Japanese valued philosophical understandings of these events, often over sociological or empirical explanations, but also locates Japan's experience of modernity within a larger global process marked by both modernism and fascism. What caught the attention of Japanese thinkers was how the production of desire actually threatened historical culture. These intellectuals sought to "overcome" the materialism and consumerism associated with the West, particularly the United States. They proposed versions of a modernity rooted in cultural authenticity and aimed at infusing meaning into everyday life, whether through art, memory, or community. Harootunian traces these ideas in the works of Yanagita Kunio, Tosaka Jun, Gonda Yasunosuke, and Kon Wajiro, among others, and relates their arguments to those of such European writers as George Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille. Harootunian shows that Japanese and European intellectuals shared many of the same concerns, and also stresses that neither Japan's involvement with fascism nor its late entry into the capitalist, industrial scene should cause historians to view its experience of modernity as an oddity. The author argues that strains of fascism ran throughout most every country in Europe and in many ways resulted from modernizing trends in general. This book, written by a leading scholar of modern Japan, amounts to a major reinterpretation of the nature of Japan's modernity.

Remarkably little has been written on the subject of modernism in Japanese fiction. Until now there has been neither a comprehensive survey of Japanese modernist fiction nor an anthology of translations to provide a systematic introduction. Only recently have the terms "modernism" and "modernist" become part of the standard discourse in English on modern Japanese literature and doubts concerning their authenticity vis-a-vis Western European modernism remain. This anomaly is especially ironic in view of the decidedly modan prose crafted by such well-known Japanese writers as Kawabata Yasunari, Nagai Kafu, and Tanizaki Jun’ichiro­. By contrast, scholars in the visual and fine arts, architecture, and poetry readily embraced modanizumu as a key concept for describing and analyzing Japanese culture in the 1920s and 1930s. This volume addresses this discrepancy by presenting in translation for the first time a collection of twenty-five stories and novellas representative of Japanese authors who worked in the modernist idiom from 1913 to 1938. Its prefatory materials provide a systematic overview of the literary movement’s salient features—anti-naturalism, cosmopolitanism, the concept of the double self, and actionism—and describe how modanizumu evolved from its early "jagged edges" into a sophisticated yet popular expression of Japanese urban life in the first half of the twentieth century. The modanist style, characterized by youthful exuberance, a tongue-in-cheek tone, and narrative techniques like superimposition, is amply illustrated. Modanizumu introduces faces altogether new or relatively unknown: Abe Tomoji, Kajii Motojiro, Murayama Kaita, Osaki Midori, Tachibana Sotoo, Takeda Rintaro, Tani Joji, Yoshiyuki Eisuke, and Yumeno Kyusaku. It also revisits such luminaries as Kawabata, Tanizaki, and the detective novelist Edogawa Ranpo. Key works that it culls from the modernist repertoire include Funahashi Seiichi’s Diving, Hagiwara Sakutaro’s "Town of Cats," Ito Sei’s Streets of Fiendish Ghosts, and Kawabata’s film scenario Page of Madness. This volume moves beyond conventional views to place this important movement in Japanese fiction within a global context: an indigenous expression born of the fission of local creativity and the fusion of cross-cultural interaction.

This significant historical study recasts modern art in Japan as a “parallel modernism” that was visually similar to Euroamerican modernism, but developed according to its own internal logic. Using the art and thought of prominent Japanese modern artist Koga Harue (1895–1933) as a lens to understand this process, Chinghsin Wu explores how watercolor, cubism, expressionism, and surrealism emerged and developed in Japan in ways that paralleled similar trends in the west, but also rejected and diverged from them. In this first English-language book on Koga Harue, Wu provides close readings of virtually all of the artist’s major works and provides unprecedented access to the critical writing about modernism in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s through primary source documentation, including translations of period art criticism, artist statements, letters, and journals.